Caulk and adhesive manufacturers and packaging companies such as General Electric, Corporation, Suncoco, Inc., or Dow Corning Corporation of Midland, Mich. often package caulk, adhesive or sealants for use in a cylindrical cartridge which are selected standard sizes and can be used in a mechanical or pressurized caulk guns. A standard size cartridge for consumer use holds one tenth of a gallon and measures about eight and one half inches long with a diameter of a little under two inches. During manufacture, an identification label is applied to the outside of cartridges typically using a silk screen or off-set printing process. In the silk screening process, a fine mesh screen covered by a stencil is held against the outside surface of the cartridge. The stencil is a sheet of material which is impenetrable with respect to the ink used. An image of the design to be printed onto the cartridge is removed from a sheet of material to create the stencil. As the screen and stencil come into contact with the cartridge, ink is applied by a roller, brush, squeegee or the like to the surface of the stencil and the exposed screen. The stencil allows only the ink passing through the open areas to contact and adhere to the cartridge.
Companies produce many thousands of cartridges per day so that even a small percentage of rejects due to label application problems, incorrect label information, or mislabeling amount to thousands of cartridges which must be either recycled, destroyed or reworked. Moreover, residual ink or paper left on the cartridge must be separated from scarp even in regrind to avoid contamination of new cartridges. It can be seen that the resulting loss translates into thousands of dollars of expense per day. Additionally, there is a limit to the amount of waste cartridges that can be recycled into new cartridges as regrind due to the different heat characteristics and chemical and physical properties of the regrind as compared with virgin feed material. Therefore, the unused and un-recyclable cartridges add to landfill volumes which costs manufacturers and society in a variety of ways.